مقاله حالتهای مغزی

حالت های مغزی

Funda-Mentality" Is the Conscious Mind Subtly Linked to a Basic Level of the Universe?

Funda-Mentality" Is the Conscious Mind Subtly Linked to a Basic Level of the Universe?

Summary

Age-old battle lines over the puzzling nature of mental experience are shaping a modern resurgence in the study of consciousness. On one side are the long-dominant "physicalists" (reductionists, materialists, functionalists, computationalists. . ) who see consciousness as an emergent property of the brain's neural networks ("brain = mind = computer"). On the alternative, rebellious side are those who see a necessary added ingredient: proto-conscious experience intrinsic to reality, perhaps understandable through modern physics (panpsychists, pan-experientialists, "funda-mentalists"). It is argued here that the physicalist premise alone is unable to solve completely the difficult issues of consciousness (e.g. experience, binding, pre-conscious conscious transition, non-computability and free will) and that to do so will require supplemental panpsychist/pan-experiential philosophy expressed in modern physics. In one such scheme proto-conscious experience is a basic property of physical reality accessible to a quantum process associated with brain activity. The proposed process is Roger Penrose's objective reduction (OR), a self-organizing "collapse" of the quantum wave function related to instability at the most basic level of spacetime geometry. In the Penrose-Hameroff model of "orchestrated objective reduction" ("Orch OR"), OR quantum computation occurs in cytoskeletal microtubules within the brain's neurons and links cognition with proto-conscious experience and Platonic values embedded in spacetime geometry. The basic idea is that consciousness involves brain activities coupled to self-organizing ripples in fundamental reality.